China | Former Chinese senior banker Bai Tianhui executed for taking US$155 million in bribes

Bai is the second senior figure from Huarong to be put to death for corruption following the execution of Lai Xiaomin in 2021

China has executed a former senior banker who was found guilty of taking more than 1.1 billion yuan (US$155 million) in bribes.

Bai Tianhui, the former general manager of the asset management firm China Huarong International Holdings, was executed on Tuesday after the Supreme People’s Court approved the sentence, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

The state-owned offshore unit Bai ran was taken over by Citic Group and renamed China Citic Financial Asset Management in January last year.

It is rare for Chinese courts to hand out death sentences to state workers convicted of corruption charges.

However, Bai was the second senior Haurong executive to be sentenced to death for corruption.

In January 2021, Lai Xiaomin, former chairman of China Huarong Asset Management and Bai’s former boss, suffered a similar fate.

Lai was the first official to receive the ultimate penalty for corruption since Xu Maiyong and Jiang Renjie, former deputy mayors of the eastern cities of Hangzhou and Suzhou, who were put to death in 2011.

Lai, who was executed a month after his sentencing, was found guilty of taking almost 1.8 billion yuan in bribes, embezzling more than 25 million yuan in public assets, and bigamy.

Bai was convicted and sentenced in May last year by the Second Intermediate People’s Court in Tianjin. The death sentence was then reviewed and approved by the Supreme People’s Court.

The court said on Tuesday: “The amount of bribes received by Bai Tianhui was extremely large, the crime’s circumstances were particularly serious and the social impact was particularly severe.”

It added that Bai’s crime had harmed the interests of the state and the Chinese people and “he should be severely punished according to law”.

The supreme court added that the facts of the case were “clear” and the evidence against Bai was “conclusive and sufficient”, so his sentence was “appropriate”.

It did not say how Bai was executed, but said he was allowed to meet with close relatives beforehand.

Bai is among a slew of finance officials hunted down in an ongoing anti-corruption campaign launched in response to President Xi Jinping’s calls to focus on the financial sector.

The country’s top anti-corruption watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, detained 54 state regulators, bankers and senior financial executives in the first nine months of the year, according to a tally by the South China Morning Post.

Last year, a total of 97 senior financial executives were purged, slightly less than 2023’s total of 101.

Source: scmp.com, Staff, December 9, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

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